Defining Beauty

 I'm back in Florence.

This time, I took the whole family. There are nine of us - children,  one of the spouses, and all five granddaughters. And me. And this time, they made the itinerary. I told them to choose whatever fascinated them the most, hoping of course, they would see in it what I did: the grandeur of the Renaissance, the beauty of the art, and the history of politics, and the glory of God. And, of course, they did not. They chose very differently. A favorite winery, an interactive museum, a fortress town from a video game. Except  to see the David, no one wanted to go near an art gallery. Except for the Vatican and the  Pantheon, no one was interested in a church. 

It's not generational. It's more temperament, I think. Anyway, whatever it is, what brought me to Florence, and what keeps me going back, is the beauty. In art, in architecture, in science, in literature, in music, in the easy statliness of the ringing bells and the delightful lilt of Italian voices. It is all beautiful, and weaves an intoxicating web that catches me every time. I don't care much about the shopping or the gelato. I do care about the chanted rhytum of the nunc dimitis and the graceful swing of the bells in the campanile. I care about the marbeled eyes of a hero that seem to really see.

 I care about the medallion in the Piazza de la Signoria commemorating the hanging and burning of my favorite renegade monk, Girolamo Savanarola, 

I care about the  second floor garden that confined the imprisoned Galileo. I care about trying to figure out whether the Medicis, who largely financed Renaissance art, were benefactors or tyrants (they were probably both).

Lorenzo the Magnificent

For a long time, I couldn't figure out why I cared about any of this, then Simone Weil told me:

"Beauty is the incarnation of God in the world so all first rate art is inherently religious. Beauty is the real presence of God in matter."

That's exactly it. Beauty is how God shows Himself in the world. That's why we all recognize it in some form. God is in all of us, but the extent to which we seek out God determines the extent to which we are able to appreciate beauty. Beauty is part of our blood and bone in the same way as is oxygen or iron. There's a disease in Florence called Stendahl Syndrome - literally a malady characterised by dizziness or fevers- that is the result of too much beauty too fast. 

Beauty is the way we bridge the gap between God and man. Another piece of Weil wisdom: 

"Workers need poetry more than bread. Only religion - God - can be the source of this poetry. Its deprivation explains all forms of demoralization. Slavery is work without the light of eternity." 

And we are meant to bridge that gap. That, I think, is our main job as humans. That's the reason for the Eucharist - to apply the glory of God to material cells. 

"Manual work is time entering the body. Through work, man becomes matter like Christ in the Eucharist. "

Exactly. God gives us Himself. In bread. In art. In work. In beauty. 

Florence image: History Extra

David image: Fine Art America

Savanarola image: Alamy

Lorenzo image: Wikipedia

More Simone Weil: The Choice or: Nobody Ever Wins a War

 Every once in a while, not often mind you, a philosopher will say exactly the right thing in a short, concise form that really hits home. Today, Simone Weil did that for me.

"Whoever takes the sword will perish by the sword. Whoever lets go of it will perish by the cross."

Perfect.

Now let's do a little unpacking. The first part will be familiar to most people. Jesus said, "Whoever lives by the sword will die by the sword." We get that, well, in theory anyway. None of us do it. Not really. Everybody doesn't have a basement full of guns and ammo, but almost all of us are inclined to take God's justice ("Vengence is mine; I will repay, says the Lord" - Deut 32:35) into our own hands. Defending the defenseless, or even giving the bad guys what we think they have coming to them, seems like standard procedure. What else are we to do? 

Well, maybe take God at His word. Don't do it. Just don't. 

But what then, some of us wonder. What if no one stops the playground bully? He grows up to be Don Trump. What if no one stops Hitler? We all end up speaking German and clicking our heels. Or do we? I mean, no one really knows what would happen because no one has really tried. 

OK, a few have - Ghandi and Martin Luther King, for example, but things didn't go really well for them, did it? Minor victories, but nothing universally world-changing. And yet we admire them for what they did do. We know on some level that humans were not meant to exact violent revenge on one another. We were not meant to kill each other. Even in an effort to save innocent lives.

I've often wondered what would happen if we stopped taking revenge, or even defense, against a clearly evil enemy. First off, I think a lot of innocent people would die. A lot more even than in the fighting, perhaps. And at the end of it. we would still be stuck with a tyrant. That's not a happy ending, and it kind of proves Simone's second point. Once we lay down our weapons, we will die anyway, but by the cross, by sacrifice, without personally perpetrated, heart-destroying violence. It could happen, and I can't help feel there's some kind of salvation in it. After all, nobody wins a war. Ever. 

That's one thing about philosophers. They are some of the few people who admit everyone is going to die and really believe it. That's most of the cause of all their angst, but it does lead to a good, heavy dose of reality. We have to choose how we are going to live and in doing so, choose to a great degree how we are going to die. Because we will die, you know. We all will. And what will we be holding onto at the end? The self-righteous end of an .357 or  the cross? If my own death is going to count for something, let it speak of love.

Image: Sportsman Outdoor Superstore

What is Your Myth? - or - Living with Comfortable Fictions or Taking the Red Pill

 

We are obsessed with truth. We want it. From everyone.

But do we really? My late husband Dave had a reputation, not always a good one, for always telling the truth, a reputation that included unwelcome truths as well as welcome ones. Some folks thought this some kind of superpower, but some thought it anathema and issued warnings to anyone asking his opinion about anything. 

We spend so much of our time keeping company with pleasant truths, you see. Did you ever watch a Hallmark movie? Did you ever just want someone to tell you that, in spite of appearances, everything was going to be all right? I do. And I want to hear it because I know that often, it won't. Pleasant fiction.

John F. Kennedy has something to say about this when he gave an address at Yale University in 1962: 

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Oh, boy.

Myths. Preconcieved ideas. Cliches. Ideas that look like truths but feed vacant wishes. Premises that distort all of our possible futures with unlikely or impossible promises. Happily ever after endings.

That just isn't life. 

But we still color our outlooks with worldview. Here are a few examples:

• The Cleavers - the concept that there is or was a perfect family whose every member understood their role and lived contentedly in it, not making waves, and smiling when they took out the garbage.
• John Wayne - the idea that there is a simple world where black is black and white is white, where the good guys wore the right hat so you could recognize them and always win in the end without being scarred by the men they had to kill to get there.
• Consipracy Theory - the worldview that knows nothing is what it seems, that everyone you meet is out to get you, that no one can be trusted
• That Old Time Religion - A basic assurance that everything one needs to know about God is in the Bible, that church structure can be trusted implicitly, that nothing good can ever be added to or subtracted from what one hears in church on Sunday
• Blood is always thicker - the idea that family precludes every other relationship, that blood relationships inevitably tie people together no matter what, that even though people grow and change, family will love one and respect another forever.

Forgive me if these betray my own personal prejudices - they undoubtedly do - but I know folks who hold these worldviews and even though they are a source of consolation to them, a comfortable way of living in a confusing world, they are also a source of almost constant disillusionment because, well, because they're not true. 

No worldview always applies. No overall ideology works in every circumstance. They are myths. Myths that help us cope, to be sure, but myths nonetheless. 

The truth is that the world is a constantly changing combination of goods and evils shifting every moment, necessitating that we keep on our toes if we are going to stay within rails of reality. In short, we have to THINK. We have to go through the agony of figuring things out if we want to live in the real world. We have to take the red pill. It isn't always fun, but at least it's real. 

Image: The Telegraph

Being Blind Bart

 

Years ago, I was the fortunate writer of and participant in an annual passion play my Richland Center, Wisconsin church wrote and produced called "The Keys, the Cross, and the Kingdom." There are lots of stories and memories arising from those years, but one of the enduring is Blind Bart's. You know, Bartimaeus the blind, annoying beggar from Mark's gospel:

Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and His disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside, begging. When he heard it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!" Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more. "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" Jesus stopped and said "Call him." So they called to the blind man, "Cheer up! On your feet! He's calling you." Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus. "What do you want me to do for you?", Jesus asked him. The blind man said, "Rabbi, I want to see."  "Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you." Immediately, he received his sight and followed Jesus. --Mark 10: 46-52.

Good old Blind Bart, persistent Blind Bart, annoying Blind Bart. I like him. There he crouched, in the middle of a pressing crowd, yelling at the top of his lungs to get Jesus’ attention. People around him told him to shut up and he wouldn’t. And what did Jesus do? He stopped dead and looked around, telling his disciples to bring this loudmouth closer and when Bart got there, Jesus looked at this blind beggar and asked him a question. “What do you want me to do for you?” SERIOUSLY? Here’s this guy, blind, ragged, and dirty, and Jesus doesn’t know what he wants?

Of course He does. But He wants Bart to know it, too. He wants Bart to say it. 

Something similar happened to my late husband and I years ago. When my husband was very ill near the end of his life, he was referred to a doctor who looked him right in the eye and told Dave he would not get better, that he would continue to sicken and at some point not too distant he would die. That took courage to say and for us, courage to hear. But the part that came next was the most important. Dave was given homework. He was to determine the thing he valued most about life, that thing should he be left without, he would not want to get up in the morning. Then he was to focus what remained of his life on that thing. Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like Jesus.

Predictably, Bart says, “I want to see”. Ironically, that’s what Jesus wants for him, too. In fact, that’s what Jesus wants for all of us. To see. He wants us to see Him. He wants us to see ourselves through His eyes. He wants us to understand what we’re asking for when we pray and to look deeper than our latest catastrophe. He wants us to acknowledge what we desire and more importantly, why we desire it.

When Jesus asks us “What do you want me to do for you?” it may be that the best answer is to remember that He is already in us. Maybe the best answer is for Him to help make us holy.

Image: Jesus Film Project

Jesus vs Germs: Who Wins?

 I just love Martha of Bethany. She's so relatable.

Pretty much everyone who knows the story about Martha and her sister Mary at the dinner they gave for Jesus and His disciples knows about how Mary sat at Jesus feet, listening to Him the whole time while Martha ran around cooking and serving and cleaning up and - oh, yes - griping about it. 

Jesus loved them both, of course, but gently reminded Martha that Mary, in her reverent attention, had chosen the better part. Hang on to the eternal, the supernatural, He seemed to say, and the natural may not take care of itself, but it will be seen to sooner or later in its own proper time.

Well, Martha's second faux pas doesn't get as much press. When their brother Lazarus died and Jesus showed up late, both women expressed their faith that whatever Jesus did or, presumably, didn't do, would be the right thing. But when Jesus instructed the gathered people to move the stone from the mouth of the grave, Martha was horrified. "But he's been in there four days! He will stink!", she said.

She was right, of course, but saw no contradiction between Jesus' ability to do miracles and her idea that He was unable to overcome natural decay. As if He could do one but not the other. In the end, He did both, of course, but like the dinner incident, we are invited to see our contradicting selves through Martha.

One of my favorite places to see a modern contradiction is in our refusal to received Holy Communion in a common cup. Here's my reasoning:

Communion is a miracle of faith as much as any healing or raising from the dead. Bread and wine become a pathway to and encounter with God. But we won't drink it from a common cup because the cup has somebody else's germs. We might get sick from it. It's unsanitary. It might even be dangerous. 

Really?

God can turn bread and wine into Himself but not protect us from illness or danger in the taking of it? He can make the elements holy but He can't make them safe? 

This is not only a logical contradiction worthy of our old friend Martha. It's a lack of faith. 

Communion is communion both with God and in solidarity with each other - a risk only if the communicant doesn't believe God or doesn't believe there is any sacrament in the eating and drinking of it at all. 

So, who wins in Jesus vs. germs?  Jesus, of course. Now we just have to act like it.

Image: St. Benedict's Table, American Magazine

Whose Side is God on, Anyway?

 

Memorial Day is here again and I'm finding patriotic holidays increasingly uncomfortable.

There. I said it. 

It's not just because the U.S. becomes harder and harder to love (it does), but I'm starting to wonder whether it should even be an object of love and fealty at all.

The more I study this, I can't find a single place where God encourages love for country. Not one. 

He encourages us to obey our leaders (Hebrews 13:17) and to render unto our governments what rightly belongs to them (Matt 22:21) but beyond that, our commanded affiliation is to God and God alone. We are to love God first and then our neighbor. Period. 

We all know of conflicts in which both sides claim God's preference for them and that, of course, is impossible. He can love all men equally, but to prefer one side over another when they espouse opposite aims is not who He is. He loves the humans He made. All of them. And we are supposed to do that, too. 

If we're honest, though, we WANT God to be on our side of whatever conflict we're in. Who wouldn't? But at the same time, we also see the impossibility of opposing forces each allied exclusively with God. This is where philosophy comes in handy, because this is a logical contradiction. God cannot logically agree with both the invader and the invaded. A cannot equal not-A. God loves all combatants equally.

But what DOES God have to say about nations?

First, that He made them all (Acts 17:26) "From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth." God's nation is not defined by boundaries, but by His creation of them.

Then that He should and will be exalted among those nations (Ps 46:10) (Ps 86:9) (Is 60:3)

Also that no nation is righteous in itself but only insofar as it follows and worships God (Zech 2:11) "And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people." (Gen 22:18) "And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

A nation is not favored by God because of history, heritage, location, boundaries, language, declaration or constitution. It is holy simply when its people seek and worship Him and any allegiance is to be sworn to Him alone. In this, all people sharing that allegiance are one. 

God's nation is not the United States of America or any other humans gathered within a man-marked border. We are to have but one sworn identity and that to God, even Israel. When God said,

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth." -(Deut 7:6),  He began a work that would eventually encompass every single human being He made. 

"And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him." (Dan 7:27)

As for Memorial Day, my husband fought in the Vietnam War and his combat experience shortened his life by as much as 20 years. Dave never regretted his military service, but its greatest cost to him was not conscripting the years of his life, but putting him in situations that led him to doubt God's mercy and justice. It took him more than 40 years to recover from the scars this war left, but God sent grace enough so that he could again stand before Him with confidence. God and some bizarre national allegiance God might have was not responsible for the damage done. The country Dave fought for was responsible - the United States, the one whose flag we wave on Memorial Day, the one who we say is under God, the one to whom we swear allegiance without remembering all of its lies and errors. 

If a country is good, it is good because enough of its people pay attention to what God demands of each of them individually, not because of some restricted ideology that defines we are smarter, better, stronger, and more righteous than those humans who live 10 or 100 miles beyond a particular demarcation. 

                               (Dave around the time he worked undercover in Southeast Asia.

He burned his green beret in disgust)

The country Dave fought for betrayed him, plain and simple. It didn't act according to its precepts. All countries do this sooner or later. That's why God tells us to identify ourselves with Him, not with them. 

On this Memorial Day, I can honor those who acted according to what they thought was right by fighting and dying for their country, but I can no longer honor the country they fought for. It does not deserve it. 

Images: Dreamstime

Answering the Unanswerable: Why People of Faith Study Philosophy

 

I went back to school yesterday and was reminded of something important. I remembered why I went in the first place - to make sense of things. 

This is what the whiteboard looked like at the end of class.  Let me translate.

We were studying Kierkegaard, an angst-ridden Dane who had some of the same questions I did. Can God exist (in  philosophical terms, He can't - more later) and what in the world are we doing when we look for Him? Can He be found? And if He can, what does He look like?

Yes, this actually happened in a public university classroom and nobody cast aspersions. Nobody walked out. Nobody even objected. In fact, this is probably the only place anyone can ask these kinds of questions anymore. You can't ask them in church. Try it sometime. I have, and what we get is a combination of outrage and deer-in-the-headlights. Here, in school, when taught by a person of faith, we can arrive together at reasonable, thoughtful answers that can provide a platform for actual living.

So what does this mean? It started with whether God can exist. In philosophical terms, He can't because existence includes some kind of material presence. A pure spirit does not have that kind of existence.  And that's OK. That doesn't make God less God. In fact, it accommodates exactly what He claims to be. More than this world. Not made of a thing of any kind. 

And then there is telos. This is one of Aristotle's terms used to describe the final or highest cause of a person or action, the highest good of any living being, a fully realized consciousness, even the state of ultimate happiness. In short, Absolute Telos is the philosophical description of God. See the words underneath? These are the words philosophers have used to describe God. Highest Good, Transcendent, Unconditional, Impossible. All words for God. 

Why do we need these words? Because the best religion can do is vague references to God as being beyond understanding, or moving in mysterious ways. Blah. That doesn't help. Philosophical descriptions provide more - a starting point for understanding just what is the difference between God and everything else in our spiritual experience. They don't just paint a foggy picture. They establish a baseline, one we can expand on.

The expansion comes with the list to the right on the board, the list of relative telos. You see, in philosophy, states are separated into absolutes, those things that exist independently of anything else, and relative, those things whose definition depends on something else. In this case, God is an absolute telos, but our lives are lived primarily through relative ones. A relative telos might be the good that comes from careful parenting, or studying to graduate, or stopping at red lights, or putting your shopping cart back at the grocery. It is a goal we recognize as working toward accomplishing personal peace or social justice. 

The thing about relative telos, though, is that we usually do them (if we think about it at all, which philosophers do) to get beyond them. We don't just want to graduate, we want to have an ultimately satisfying life. We don't just want to be good parents, we ultimately want to do our part in making the world a better place for everyone. We engage in relative telos to achieve whatever of absolute telos we can muster. We do good in this world to find whatever we can of God. 

And this was Dr. Magnusson's last powerpoint slide, the point to which he built the lecture, which was to remind us of the goal we all want. 

Some people simplisticly call it heaven, but the philosophical idea of heaven is exactly how Sunday school might define it using different words. In Sunday school, Heaven is some undefined place up there where we are completely with God. In philosophy, the same state is found as we progress through relative telos, always with our eye on the absolute, when our orientation changes us every time we find a piece of that absolute, until we find we can "live in the finite, but not have our roots in it." 

This is where we find heaven, but not some pie in the sky we get after we die, a heaven available whenever we have the focus and faith to reach for it. 

That's why people of faith study philosophy.